The "scary and frightening" Lion King

Anyone who is going to read my blog today is a bored computer nerd.. oh there I go again stereotyping again. Well at least I am in good company. Both Disney, makers of the Lion King, and Margaret Lazarus, the author of All’s Not Well in Land of “The Lion King” make broad stereotypes about the characters in Disney film The Lion King. The Lion King, a story of a young lion prince who is deceived and threatened by his jealous uncle, the second in line for the throne, is an exciting story that has become a favorite movie that many kids remember loving. This story, though it has much some action, is not a threat to kids. In Margaret Lazarus’ evaluation of the movie, she claims that there is racism hinted at within the characters. I would like to argue that unless you are searching for something to be wrong with the movie this “racism” is not easily detected. For example, in a class discussion of Margaret Lazarus’ essay, where both black and white students where represented, the whole class agreed that Margaret was making a big deal out of nothing. While trying to get her point across about the different people represented by the character’s voices in the film The Lion King, Margaret is creates harsh stereotypes that make me wonder her ability to evaluate the movie fairly from an unbiased perspective.
Margaret Lazarus’ All’s Not Well in Land of “The Lion King” critiques The Lion King harshly. She accuses Disney of associating the characters in the film to people groups. “The hyenas are dark – mostly back – and they are nasty…one of their voices is done by Whoopie Goldberg, in a clearly inner-city dialect.” She goes on later to say similar bold statements about Scar, the bad lion who is trying to take over the thrown. “Scar has a black mane, and speaks in an effeminate, limp-pawed, British style.” Scar throughout the whole movie is trying to take away the kingdom from the lion price. Disney needed a distinctive voice that would represent “the bad guy” to the audience and Disney needed someone to do it. Although I disagree with her statement that Scar spoke in an effeminate and limp-pawed form, this proves the fact that Margaret is using very broad racist stereotypes. In an effort to try to get her readers to think about implied racial tension behind the movie, Margaret Lazarus simply makes many critical stereotypes that are racist herself.
While creating kids movies such as The Lion King, was it really Disney’s intension to have an inner city ghetto feel about them? Who are we to claim that Disney had racial discrepancy hidden within their movies? I think it is really important that we take into account the age of the directed audience that this film was originally created for. When a little kid is watching The Lion King -- a movie about a lion king and his cub, who is being threatened by a bad hyena -- I doubt that this prescribed kid is thinking about the racial meaning behind the voices. Let’s be wild and say that we come across a little kid who is thinking about the voices, what little kid is going to connect Scar’s British accent with being gay? Margaret Lazarus, though she has a right to be concerned that her son might be “scared and frightened”, has gone over the top in her critique of The Lion King by making the movie about racial discrepancy, when she has no proof that the movie was originally intended for that purpose. It can just as easily be argued that the voices that Disney used in The Lion King simply portray a vivid distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.